Anti-nuke activists seek their own Greta, as Canada urged to push NATO on bombs

Ask Hugo Slim about teenaged climate change activist Greta Thunberg, and one thought comes to mind: if only there were a young person like her who was that worried about nuclear weapons.

Slim is the Geneva-based head of policy and humanitarian diplomacy for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and was in Ottawa recently to meet Canadian anti-nuclear weapons activists.

Those activists are toiling, largely out of the public eye, to persuade Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to treat the possibility of nuclear annihilation as seriously as he does the threat posed by climate change.

They are urging Trudeau to push Canada’s NATO allies, who are meeting Tuesday in London, to start talking with non-NATO nuclear states about laying down their atomic arms one day.

Canada doesn’t have nuclear weapons but its membership in NATO means it adheres to the 29-country military alliance’s nuclear-deterrent policy — that it supports having nuclear weapons in its arsenal essentially because its adversaries have them.

Slim works for an organization that opposes nuclear weapons, and is known for its scrupulous neutrality, so he says he doesn’t expect the Trudeau government to suddenly swear off nuclear weapons any time soon. But he wishes someone like 16-year-old Thunberg would come along to get under his skin and tweak the consciences of other leaders who possess or support nuclear weapons.

“There are two big existential issues around the human species at the moment — climate change and nuclear weapons. Climate change has really mobilized young people across the world. Nuclear weapons is still seen as a slightly older persons 1960s, ’70s issue. It’s hard to galvanize younger people to recognize the risk,” Slim said in a recent interview.

“If you look demographically, through history, you’ll notice one thing about political change: that it’s always young people that drive political change,” Slim added. “It’s about them seeing things and playing roles as political change-makers, as they always have in human civilization.”

The ICRC is trying to build support for the new Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, which was negotiated in 2017. More than 120 countries support the treaty, and Slim is hopeful 50 countries will ratify it by next year to bring it into force. But it has no support among the countries that possess nuclear weapons — including the United States and its allies, including Canada.

Canada has a credible track record in “weapons diplomacy” in part because it helped lead the international effort in the 1990s that led to a treaty that bans the use of anti-personnel landmines, Slim said.

Slim pointed to what many see as a troubling backslide in international agreements aimed at curbing nuclear proliferation: the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that now includes Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany; and the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the U.S. and Russia is no more.